Andrew Brandel
Biographic Data
| ID | 128680 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Brandel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Brandel |
| SIGNATURE | BRANDEL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6201-1635 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Some Words in Reply
With Moving Words, I set out to describe some of the ways people struggled to make life literary across a variety of spaces in a city each called Berlin. I was interested in how people lived with literature, how it accompanied them, how it was involved in the process of making life livable and and, at times, denying it. I found that this would require rethinking methodological conventions in anthropology, not least because starting from a rigid d…
A Matter of Detail: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics
Locating the State: Between Region and History
If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore …
Dialogues: Anthropology and Literature
The relationship between anthropology and literature has attracted renewed theoretical energy in recent years (Brandel 2020; Debaene 2014; Fassin 2014; Reed 2018; Wulff 2016), developing and deepening connections with, for example, anthropological theories of art (Reed 2011), religion (Furani 2012), subjectivity (Olszewska 2015), and ethics (Bush 2017), as well as with allied fields and traditions, including postcolonial theory (Sadana 2012), Bou…
Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere
For an Ordinary Aesthetics
The impetus for this special issue comes less from conventional debates in philosophical aesthetics itself and instead from one area of recent work on ethics.More specifically, our turn to aesthetics has been inspired by a rich conversation that has emerged in recent years between anthropology and philosophy on the idea and importance of the ordinary.Oftentimes, the ordinary continues "to be treated as a residual category of routine and repetitio…
"Introduction to the Special Section, "The Ordinariness of Cross-Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional
This introduction orients the reader to the experiments with thinking inter-disciplinarily in this special section of Anthropology and Humanism. A long history of shared conversation between science fiction and anthropology has both been shadowed by colonialism and offered promising resources for remaking the world. We invited anthropologists, film critics, and literary theorists into conversation without assuming in advance to know what constitu…
A Parody in Berlin: Reading the Obvious and the Ordinary in Historical Violence
The popularity of Timur Vermes's Er ist wieder da (2012), its widespread translation, and the film version (2015) all raised critical hackles in Germany, provoking debate about the perceived risk of normalization associated with satirizing Hitler, or worse, inviting empathy by humanizing him. Hitler escapes his historical demise and awakes in the twenty-first century, where he is misrecognized as an actor and becomes popular on the internet. I re…
Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality
Literature and Anthropology
Literature is often understood to be one of anthropology’s most recurrent and provocative companions in thought. The relationship between the two has taken a number of different and variously interrelated forms. Perhaps the most familiar of these is the theorization of the anthropologist’s status as a writer; this work tends to take its cue from certain strands of postmodernism and invokes literary techniques as tools through which to address con…
Plotting the field: Fragments and narrative in Malinowski's stories of the baloma
Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given coherence by ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how anthropological icons like hau, mana, and the shaman, are created, and suggest that there might be fragments …
The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Fleeting Moments in Global Berlin
This article examines Berlin's ascendance to the status of a global city and in particular the tethering of this discourse to the city's attraction for institutions of world literature. Drawing on fieldwork between 2011 and 2017, it offers a new, critical vantage on the multiple trajectories that migrants follow into and through Berlin, as well as how these paths collide. Training ethnographic attention on one important site in which these crossi…
Genres of Witnessing: Narrative, Violence, Generations
Anthropology has troubled longstanding assumptions about experiences of catastrophic violence, by revealing the limits of trauma theory's insistence on the cathartic value of public expressions of pain. Ethnography has revealed how the suffering inflicted by such events becomes stitched into the fabric of everyday life. In this paper, we take this insight further by exploring the different genres through which experiences of violence are shared w…
Locations and locutions
This chapter focuses on a small slice of the work done in universities and research institutions in India in order to understand how national public preoccupations continue to structure anthropological/sociological knowledge production and its reception within a pluri-centric academic world. It shows that there are very strong ties between Indian scholars and their counterparts in the diasporic communities from South Asia. The reception of schola…
The art of conviviality
This essay proposes a conception of anthropology as a romantic science concerned with what Lévi-Strauss called a posteriori logics. I shift our attention from disagreements in conceptual knowledge to conditions of possible experience-that is, to the grounds of the emergence of concepts in life together, com vivere. Such conviviality, I suggest, offers to us another way to understand the work of ethnography as a sensibility through which we place …
Genres of Witnessing: Narrative, Violence, Generations
Anthropology has troubled longstanding assumptions about experiences of catastrophic violence, by revealing the limits of trauma theory's insistence on the cathartic value of public expressions of pain. Ethnography has revealed how the suffering inflicted by such events becomes stitched into the fabric of everyday life. In this paper, we take this insight further by exploring the different genres through which experiences of violence are shared w…
"Introduction to the Special Section, "The Ordinariness of Cross-Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional
This introduction orients the reader to the experiments with thinking inter-disciplinarily in this special section of Anthropology and Humanism. A long history of shared conversation between science fiction and anthropology has both been shadowed by colonialism and offered promising resources for remaking the world. We invited anthropologists, film critics, and literary theorists into conversation without assuming in advance to know what constitu…
A Parody in Berlin: Reading the Obvious and the Ordinary in Historical Violence
The popularity of Timur Vermes's Er ist wieder da (2012), its widespread translation, and the film version (2015) all raised critical hackles in Germany, provoking debate about the perceived risk of normalization associated with satirizing Hitler, or worse, inviting empathy by humanizing him. Hitler escapes his historical demise and awakes in the twenty-first century, where he is misrecognized as an actor and becomes popular on the internet. I re…
The art of conviviality
This essay proposes a conception of anthropology as a romantic science concerned with what Lévi-Strauss called a posteriori logics. I shift our attention from disagreements in conceptual knowledge to conditions of possible experience-that is, to the grounds of the emergence of concepts in life together, com vivere. Such conviviality, I suggest, offers to us another way to understand the work of ethnography as a sensibility through which we place …
Locating the State: Between Region and History
If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore …
Dialogues: Anthropology and Literature
The relationship between anthropology and literature has attracted renewed theoretical energy in recent years (Brandel 2020; Debaene 2014; Fassin 2014; Reed 2018; Wulff 2016), developing and deepening connections with, for example, anthropological theories of art (Reed 2011), religion (Furani 2012), subjectivity (Olszewska 2015), and ethics (Bush 2017), as well as with allied fields and traditions, including postcolonial theory (Sadana 2012), Bou…
For an Ordinary Aesthetics
The impetus for this special issue comes less from conventional debates in philosophical aesthetics itself and instead from one area of recent work on ethics.More specifically, our turn to aesthetics has been inspired by a rich conversation that has emerged in recent years between anthropology and philosophy on the idea and importance of the ordinary.Oftentimes, the ordinary continues "to be treated as a residual category of routine and repetitio…
Plotting the field: Fragments and narrative in Malinowski's stories of the baloma
Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given coherence by ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how anthropological icons like hau, mana, and the shaman, are created, and suggest that there might be fragments …
The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Fleeting Moments in Global Berlin
This article examines Berlin's ascendance to the status of a global city and in particular the tethering of this discourse to the city's attraction for institutions of world literature. Drawing on fieldwork between 2011 and 2017, it offers a new, critical vantage on the multiple trajectories that migrants follow into and through Berlin, as well as how these paths collide. Training ethnographic attention on one important site in which these crossi…
The art of conviviality
This essay proposes a conception of anthropology as a romantic science concerned with what Lévi-Strauss called a posteriori logics. I shift our attention from disagreements in conceptual knowledge to conditions of possible experience-that is, to the grounds of the emergence of concepts in life together, com vivere. Such conviviality, I suggest, offers to us another way to understand the work of ethnography as a sensibility through which we place …
Locations and locutions
This chapter focuses on a small slice of the work done in universities and research institutions in India in order to understand how national public preoccupations continue to structure anthropological/sociological knowledge production and its reception within a pluri-centric academic world. It shows that there are very strong ties between Indian scholars and their counterparts in the diasporic communities from South Asia. The reception of schola…
Literature and Anthropology
Literature is often understood to be one of anthropology’s most recurrent and provocative companions in thought. The relationship between the two has taken a number of different and variously interrelated forms. Perhaps the most familiar of these is the theorization of the anthropologist’s status as a writer; this work tends to take its cue from certain strands of postmodernism and invokes literary techniques as tools through which to address con…
Plotting the field: Fragments and narrative in Malinowski's stories of the baloma
Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given coherence by ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how anthropological icons like hau, mana, and the shaman, are created, and suggest that there might be fragments …
The Prosody of Social Ties: Poetry and Fleeting Moments in Global Berlin
This article examines Berlin's ascendance to the status of a global city and in particular the tethering of this discourse to the city's attraction for institutions of world literature. Drawing on fieldwork between 2011 and 2017, it offers a new, critical vantage on the multiple trajectories that migrants follow into and through Berlin, as well as how these paths collide. Training ethnographic attention on one important site in which these crossi…
Genres of Witnessing: Narrative, Violence, Generations
Anthropology has troubled longstanding assumptions about experiences of catastrophic violence, by revealing the limits of trauma theory's insistence on the cathartic value of public expressions of pain. Ethnography has revealed how the suffering inflicted by such events becomes stitched into the fabric of everyday life. In this paper, we take this insight further by exploring the different genres through which experiences of violence are shared w…
Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality
Language in Flight: Home and Elsewhere
For an Ordinary Aesthetics
The impetus for this special issue comes less from conventional debates in philosophical aesthetics itself and instead from one area of recent work on ethics.More specifically, our turn to aesthetics has been inspired by a rich conversation that has emerged in recent years between anthropology and philosophy on the idea and importance of the ordinary.Oftentimes, the ordinary continues "to be treated as a residual category of routine and repetitio…
"Introduction to the Special Section, "The Ordinariness of Cross-Time Relations: Anthropology, Literature, and the Science Fictional
This introduction orients the reader to the experiments with thinking inter-disciplinarily in this special section of Anthropology and Humanism. A long history of shared conversation between science fiction and anthropology has both been shadowed by colonialism and offered promising resources for remaking the world. We invited anthropologists, film critics, and literary theorists into conversation without assuming in advance to know what constitu…
A Parody in Berlin: Reading the Obvious and the Ordinary in Historical Violence
The popularity of Timur Vermes's Er ist wieder da (2012), its widespread translation, and the film version (2015) all raised critical hackles in Germany, provoking debate about the perceived risk of normalization associated with satirizing Hitler, or worse, inviting empathy by humanizing him. Hitler escapes his historical demise and awakes in the twenty-first century, where he is misrecognized as an actor and becomes popular on the internet. I re…
Locating the State: Between Region and History
If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore …
Dialogues: Anthropology and Literature
The relationship between anthropology and literature has attracted renewed theoretical energy in recent years (Brandel 2020; Debaene 2014; Fassin 2014; Reed 2018; Wulff 2016), developing and deepening connections with, for example, anthropological theories of art (Reed 2011), religion (Furani 2012), subjectivity (Olszewska 2015), and ethics (Bush 2017), as well as with allied fields and traditions, including postcolonial theory (Sadana 2012), Bou…
A Matter of Detail: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics
Some Words in Reply
With Moving Words, I set out to describe some of the ways people struggled to make life literary across a variety of spaces in a city each called Berlin. I was interested in how people lived with literature, how it accompanied them, how it was involved in the process of making life livable and and, at times, denying it. I found that this would require rethinking methodological conventions in anthropology, not least because starting from a rigid d…
Sociology (11 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Anthropology (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Ethnography (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · Art (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Everyday life (5 works)